Margaret Catherine "Peggy" Rabideau

1930 - 2022

By Mark Zaborney
Blade Staff Writer

Margaret Catherine Rabideau, a teacher and school librarian who led a shift to computerized databases among libraries in the Sylvania district, died of heart failure Saturday in the Sylvania home of her daughter Marsha Drees. She was 91.

She moved to Sylvania from West Toledo more than a decade ago, after her husband died, and was with her daughter the last five months.

Mrs. Rabideau, who was best known as Peggy, retired in 2001 after more than a decade as director of instructional media services for the Sylvania schools.

"She was equally supportive of the students and the faculty," her daughter Marsha said. "Having been a teacher in the classroom, she saw her mission to make their jobs flow and make that curriculum come alive. Students - she wanted them to have the confidence to utilize a library."

Early in her Sylvania tenure, she oversaw a project to digitize the card catalogs of seven elementary school libraries - a process that involved the help of 200 mothers who volunteered to enter information in a database and place a bar code on each of 57,000 volumes.

"Automation is time consuming," Mrs. Rabideau told The Blade in 1992, as the elementary phase of the project wrapped up and as the junior and high school phase awaited passage of a levy.

"She was a woman ahead of her time. She was smart and was not afraid to do anything," her daughter Mary Pagels said.

The Ohio Educational Library Media Association named her "Ohio Media Specialist of the Year" for 1993. The Sylvania school district recognized her as educator of the year for 2001. She later was named a University of Toledo distinguished alumna. She was honored twice by the Ohio General Assembly.

She liked the honors, her daughter Mary said, but "she was just doing stuff and making stuff happen. My dad was her biggest cheerleader. He would say, 'You can do that. What are you worried about?'"

After caring for her children at home, she'd returned to the workforce in the late 1970s. She taught journalism and English at Start High School. She also served as library and media specialist at Start. She later had that role at Bowsher, Rogers, Woodward, and Macomber Vocational Technical high schools.

She became an associate of the Sisters of St. Francis of Sylvania in 2004 and in 2016 received the community's St. Clare of Assisi Award. In retirement, she pursued in earnest her goal of visiting every presidential library.

She was born Nov. 24, 1930, in Berwyn, Ill. to Mary Agnes and Nicholas Oberle. The family moved to Toledo, and she grew up in the Old West End. She was a graduate of St. Ursula Academy and received a bachelor's degree in journalism from UT, where was on the staff of the student newspaper and was a member of Chi Omega sorority. She was assistant director of university public relations from 1952-55.

Her freelance contributions to The Blade included an article in 1968 about her large family's 250-mile voyage via the Trent-Severn Waterway from Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario aboard a 28-foot aluminum pontoon raft.

She had masters of education and educational specialist degrees from UT.

She and Gerald Rabideau married Nov. 27, 1954. He died July 27, 2009.

Surviving are her daughters Mary Pagels, Margaret Diehl, Michelle Partridge, and Marsha Drees; sons Gregory Rabideau and Grant Rabideau; nine grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.

Visitation will be from 3-8 p.m. Friday at Urbanski Funeral Home, 5055 Secor Rd. A funeral Mass will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Joseph Church Sylvania, where visitation will begin at 9 a.m.

The family suggests tributes to the Sisters of St. Francis of Sylvania or Hospice of Northwest Ohio.